Search User Interfaces for PIM

Systems for fast search of personal information are rapidly becoming ubiquitous. Such systems promise to dramatically improve personal information management, yet most are modeled on Web search in which users know very little about the content that they are searching. In contrast, search for personal information is marked by rich metadata and a variety of associative and contextual cues that can be exploited to allow users to find their information based on many different things that they may remember. People are familiar with many different characteristics of information as well as the context(s) in which they have previously encountered it. We believe that search capabilities that allow people to retrieve information from a variety of sources, using many different cues in addition to keywords or folders are critical in supporting personal information access. For several years, my colleagues and I have been investigating user interfaces for supporting search for personal information. This work suggests to us that many of the goals of PIM can be solved by creative use of search; such techniques make explicit filing and organizing far less critical for locating personal information. In this paper I will briefly describe several systems that we have developed and studied. These systems have in common the theme of trying to weave search into the flow of users' digital lives.